The question of what "we" get is not very meaningful until there is an actual "we." And if you are talking about programmers making mass-scale demands of any significance, you first need to have a common base of opinion for that mass to have a unified voice.
Now let me ask you -- if programmers were inclined to join together in this kind of way, wouldn't that first have expressed itself as some kind of coherent economic grouping like -- say -- a union? I'm sure there are a few unionized programmers out there ... uh... somewhere... but I've personally never met one, ever.
So if they won't do this for a core economic interest (salary, working conditions) then how realistic is this idea that there would be some kind of coherent constituency agititating for something "in return" for DRM? Because as it turns out, quite a few programmers benefit from being employed by companies with a stake in DRM. And that is, on some level, almost every for-profit company on the internet which makes it business selling proprietary information (content, programs, web services). Which is just about everyone, besides the relatively small proportion of economic activity at companies relying on open-source business models.
This is not about programmers at all. If anyone is going to complain, it's "consumers." There are a lot more of them, and the population of potential complainers is much larger. Whether or not that means diddly squat in a major capitalist system where all the for-profit internet-connected companies really, truly ARE a significantly incentivized interest group that pretty much like the perceived benefits of DRM... well, color me skeptical about that.